


Fibonacci

by rohpsohpic



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Childhood Friends, Coming of Age, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-23 01:35:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15595329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rohpsohpic/pseuds/rohpsohpic
Summary: There is a strange built-in numbering system for the years that neighbors Junhui and Minghao grew up together.But that doesn't mean they end up together.





	Fibonacci

**Author's Note:**

> really quick but really important: a thanks goes out to an acquaintance of mine for letting me interrogate them with weird questions about coming of age stories, and a thanks goes out to the kind soul running the junhao bingo collection for being so gracious when I accidentally spammed a draft of this fic into their inbox a few days ago. you rock.

**Fibonacci sequence**

_noun_ MATHEMATICS

              an integer sequence in which every number is the sum of the two that came before

              ex: (0) 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 …

 

3.

Junhui’s first memory is running through his third birthday without his pants on. Under his feet, wood changes to tile changes to carpet as he makes his grand entrance into the birthday party that had been planned a month in advance. Alarmed uncles dodge out of the way. A surprised auntie drops her uneaten slice of cake, and Junhui steps on it without slowing. A table of sweet, round-faced old ladies bark in laughter as his poor imploring mother chases him down with a pair of toddler-sized pants.

“My word, you’re fast for someone who still can’t climb stairs,” she catches her breath as she wipes the frosting off with a napkin and pulls the pant legs over his paddling feet. Here, she looks up at the small army of family friends with an astounded but not upset smile. “He’s going to be a runner when he grows up.”

Three-year-old Junhui isn’t looking at his mother as she finishes fixing his clothes and reluctantly lets him loose again. His little feet are already padding over to the tiny, quiet kid who has been waiting patiently in the middle of the living room floor. Even then, Junhui knows him as Minghao.

  

* * *

 

(2.

When Junhui’s mother learns that one of the couples inside their building also has a young son, she is delighted to find that she is not the only one still figuring out how to be a parent. Somehow, the grapevine manages to bring the two families together for dinner. Junhui, who has always been a quick learner, totters in unsteady circles around Minghao, the impeccably-mannered toddler who prefers to remain seated. There is a brief scare when Junhui almost wobbles into Minghao’s high chair, and Junhui’s mother quickly sits him in her lap for the rest of the meal, apologizing profusely as their hosts kindly laugh it off. She doesn’t notice the two children staring curiously at each other from opposite ends of the table.

She doesn’t expect to be invited back, but she is.)

  

* * *

 

5.

Contrary to popular belief, Wen Junhui’s first competitive sport is not track and field but piano playing. He has always been a bit all-over-the-place, never quite outgrowing his tendency to jump from one thing to the next. The only person remotely capable of grounding him is Minghao, the quiet neighbor kid who shuffles after Junhui like a shadow. At first, his mother signs him up for lessons as an outlet for his energy whenever Minghao isn’t around to play. “He’s five years old,” Junhui remembers hearing her explain to the piano teacher on that first day, her gentle hand never leaving his shoulder even as worry leaks into her voice. “Five years old is a decent time to start, right?”

And Junhui won’t forget the relief that blossoms across her face when he returns from the lesson and says, “Ma, can we get a piano, too?”

Junhui isn’t sure how she accomplishes it, but by the end of that month, they have a classical piano sitting in its own little room of the apartment. When Minghao comes over and sits on their couch, five-year-old Junhui sits down at the piano with a flourish and pretends to know what he’s doing. Despite the ghastly song number that he improvises, Minghao only stares at the towering instrument with fascination, and somehow, that makes it one of Junhui’s proudest moments in the spotlight. He’s five years old, a fledgling pianist whose feet are way too short to reach the floor, when he decides that he is going to play a better song.

So Junhui practices. And most afternoons, Minghao comes over to listen.

It’s a long time before Junhui starts racking up awards, but it’s something.

  

* * *

 

(1.

As Junhui is learning how to walk, his family is learning how to settle down. He is told that he lives in no less than five different places in those first couple of years, but he remembers none except the modest apartment he grew up in, only an hour from the beach. His mother has never been anywhere more than a day’s journey away from the sea, she boasts. But sometimes, when they visit the beach, Junhui gets the feeling that the huge seas aren’t enough to ease his mother’s longing for the busy southern port where she grew up.)

  

* * *

 

8.

The first time Minghao says “We should get married” without any context whatsoever, eight-year-old Junhui nearly chokes on his soy milk.

“Me and you?” he manages out as his afternoon snack splashes onto his favorite pair of socks.

“No, I was talking to the refrigerator,” Minghao calmly lifts his eyebrows. Meanwhile, Junhui is thrown into a brief existential crisis as he blanks on where the napkins are. Minghao dutifully hops off his precarious seat on the edge of the kitchen counter and hands one over. “Seven napkins left,” he reports as he returns to his favorite spot, then looks at Junhui and says, “Yeah, I was talking to you, but maybe I’ll change my mind.”

Junhui frowns up from his ruined socks. Even at six years old, Minghao has a mysterious quality about him that Junhui can’t quite grasp. After picking up both martial arts and dance last year and nearly breaking Junhui’s face, Minghao has steadily become more talkative. But even then, it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking half the time. Sometimes, he says things like “We should get a puppy” or “We should become ninjas” or “We should pour the cereal in _first_ ,” but marriage is something that never really comes up in their everyday conversation. Part of Junhui is relieved that Minghao is so quick to let go of that line of conversation, but another part is deeply offended. So he sputters, “Hey! You can’t do that!”

In one crushing counterargument, Minghao just quietly slides his eyes over to the dripping carton of soy milk still clutched in Junhui’s hand. Junhui blushes and returns to cleaning up the mess. Junhui may be older, and he may have won two prizes in a youth piano competition last month, but there’s never winning any arguments against Minghao. Minghao grins. “Can too. But I won’t.”

“Fine then,” Junhui says, throwing the napkin away before he realizes what he’s saying. “We’ll just have to get married.”

Then Junhui’s mouth falls open when he registers what he has agreed to, and he turns around to take it back only to see that Minghao is smiling. Not mischievously or mysteriously. He’s just smiling, and for once, Minghao looks like the kid he is. It’s easy to forget sometimes, how warm his smile can be. Junhui can’t find it in him to protest when his friend looks so happy.

“Fine then,” Minghao says, beaming. “We’ll just have to get married.”

 

* * *

 

(1.

Minghao’s parents have always taught him that the universe is endless and strange. He is a natural at listening, and so he hears when his mother tells him that her love for him is like a sequence that only gets bigger, and he hears when his father pulls him onto one knee in front of a cluttered table and starts slowly drawing an expanding spiral with the soft line of a charcoal pencil, talking all the while about a golden ratio that defines everything.)

  

* * *

 

13.

Just like his mother has never been more than a day away from the sea, Junhui can’t remember a time when he has ever been more than a day away from Minghao—so when he’s faced with the very real prospect of being separated for the first time, he panics. It’s a dance school. A boarding school. In South Korea. Junhui is sitting with his back pressed against the old couch and his legs pulled up to his chest, staring at the piano across the little room as Minghao explains.

“I haven’t even auditioned yet,” eleven-year-old Minghao says, pushing Junhui’s legs off the worn couch cushions so that he can have a seat.

“But you’ll get in,” Junhui protests. He’s sitting up now, but he still can’t bring himself to look Minghao in the eye as he continues, “You’ll get in, and neither of us know the language, and—”

Minghao interrupts suddenly, turning to look at him with shock written across his face. “Us?”

Junhui blinks back at him, not having caught the slip yet. But when he does, the solution is clear. He straightens. The panic in his chest ebbs into a firm resolve. “Yeah, us. You don’t think I’m letting you go without me, do you?”

“You don’t even dance,” Minghao points out, raising his eyebrows.

“I’ll learn,” Junhui says.

“We don’t even know the language,” Minghao adds, his mouth starting to turn into a smile.

“We’ll study together,” Junhui says confidently.

That settles it. Across from them, the piano seems to be silently humming, but Junhui barely notices over the sound of Minghao concluding, “Then let’s go to South Korea.”

Junhui makes good on his word. When this year’s auditions roll around, Minghao gets accepted, and Junhui is the first one at the celebration party and the last one out the door. His summer is spent helping Minghao study his Korean. Whenever Minghao’s head hurts after a particularly long session, they take breaks, and those time-outs are when Minghao sets to work teaching him how to dance. “It’s like wushu,” he explains, striking a pose and waiting for Junhui to follow. “You just follow the moves.”

Junhui has seen Minghao’s b-boy competitions before. After all his martial arts and dance lessons, Minghao slips into breakdancing as smoothly as a fish into water. His movements are fast and sharp and graceful all at once, like watching lightning dance across the sky. In comparison, Junhui feels blocky and stilted as he goes through the motions of learning, but Minghao is an adamant teacher. When Minghao decides that they are, in fact, going to end up in the same school one way or another, Junhui believes it, too. And Junhui practices it like he’s learning piano all over again. They alternate like that over the summer, splitting their time between Hangul textbooks and dance studios.

Minghao leaves for South Korea. A semester later, Jun follows.

 

* * *

 

(0.

Minghao is shocked when the new transfer student, Jun, turns out to be none other than Wen Junhui. He catches Jun on the latter’s second day at the school, pulling him aside with an astounded look on his face. Jun just smiles, dazzling as ever. “See? Told you I’d learn.”

Jun catches up with his studies quickly. His dancing, however, is another story. Many of the students there have trained for life. Jun, despite his natural talent, is not one of them, and he knows it. Whenever he disappears from the dorm, Minghao knows that he can find him in the practice rooms, vigorously throwing himself into the moves. It pays off in performances, and Jun is steadily improving, but his movements have yet to become as fluid as some of his peers’, and Minghao can tell that it bothers him.

Minghao meets Jun’s roommate during one of his own practice sessions. Soonyoung is a smiley, energetic student who enthuses over Minghao’s b-boying the first time they lay eyes on each other. From his rapidfire Korean, Minghao manages to glean that he is the same age as Jun, he is currently learning how to choreograph routines, and he is wildly impressed by Minghao’s moves. They become friends, and often, Minghao crashes inside Jun and Soonyoung’s dorm whenever Jungkook, his roommate, decides to have people over. With all the close quarters that come with boarding school, it’s almost like being neighbors again.

 

One day while Minghao is doing his math homework, Jungkook looks up from his phone and says out of the blue, “Hey, you mentioned that your old friend, the one who transferred, used to play piano, right?”

That afternoon, Minghao pulls Jun down to a dusty storage room with a grand piano the size of a dining table, giddy and out-of-breath as he hurriedly wipes off the cobwebs. He invites Soonyoung and Jungkook, too, but Jungkook takes one whiff of the air and starts sneezing, and Soonyoung helps him outside. Left alone with the old piano, Minghao looks at Jun with silent, fizzy anticipation. Jun is looking at the piano like it’s a ghost.

Minghao bites his lip, glancing between the two. Jun is strangely pale. “Well?”

Jun reaches for the keys, shiny and black-and-white once the gray fuzz has been dusted off, and hesitates with his hands poised over two different octaves. On the other side of the door, Jungkook’s sneezes eventually dim into awkward sniffs and Soonyoung’s muffled voice offers to grab tissues. Minghao pulls his eyes away from his oldest friend’s face and realizes that his hands are trembling in place.

“It’s been a really long time since I’ve played one of these, Hao,” Jun says, his voice catching in a way that Minghao isn’t used to hearing.

When Soonyoung opens the door to the storage room after having finished tending to Jungkook’s runny nose, he is greeted with the sight of Minghao standing in front of the piano, alone.

That’s when the illusion of normalcy starts to crack.

As the year progresses, Minghao finds himself pulled into more and more of Soonyoung’s dance routines while at Jungkook’s encouragement, Jun joins the track and field team. Between grueling dance practices and endless track meets, there is never a time when Jun is not on his feet. Minghao doesn’t know if it’s ironic or fitting. His mother has always said that Jun would be a runner, and now it’s coming true. They rarely see each other anymore, if ever. Sometimes, it feels like they are purposefully trying not to.

 

“I thought you said you grew up together,” Yugyeom frowns as they walk to Jungkook and Minghao’s dorm. It’s hard to tell when Minghao became friends with Yugyeom, but when Yugyeom comes over to visit Jungkook every other day, it’s impossible not to.

“We did,” Minghao says, gripping the strap of his bag tighter than necessary.

Yugyeom throws a glance over his shoulder, confused. “But just then, you guys barely even looked at each other.”

“We did.”

In his periphery, Minghao sees Yugyeom open his mouth, as if about to wheedle him about it, before changing his mind and closing it again. When they enter the dorm, Jungkook immediately greets them by pulling Yugyeom over to watch a dance cover on his phone. As they huddle over Jungkook’s screen, sharing earbuds and occasionally making reaction noises, Minghao changes into a more breathable shirt and swaps the towel in his bag for a clean one. If Minghao stares at the two friends longer than necessary before he slips out of the room, he doesn’t show it.

 

Soonyoung, for all his cheerfulness, has a terrifying eye for detail in the practice room. He relentlessly coaches Minghao in everything other than breakdancing, which is still known as Minghao’s respective domain. On some days, the two of them become equally frustrated with each other’s stubbornness; on other days, they are equally impressed. Soonyoung’s micromanagement makes Minghao’s moves cleaner. Minghao’s know-how makes Soonyoung think out of the box. The challenging side of Soonyoung’s nature comes out when he’s choreographing, and Minghao comes to simultaneously despise his bossiness and admire his drive. He’s going to be a great choreographer someday.

Minghao’s relationship with Soonyoung morphs into something that’s more about being strictly professional than anything, which is just fine. It gives Minghao an excuse to see less of Jun by extension. Soonyoung doesn’t complain when Minghao starts stopping by their dorm less, but sometimes, he catches Soonyoung looking at him with a furrow in his brow when he thinks no one else can see. But whenever Soonyoung tries to bring up Jun, Minghao instantly shuts him down.

 

Somewhere along the way, Minghao joins a squad that does not include Jun or Soonyoung. It consists of Jungkook, Yugyeom, and a handful of other students who happen to share the same birth year. They even create a squad name for it. Instead of surveying the cafeteria every day for a sign of Jun’s head in the crowd, Minghao starts heading straight to the table that becomes ‘97 Line’s usual haunt. It’s almost disconcertingly easy to avoid Jun when all he does is dance, sleep, and run nowadays.

 

Just over a year later, Jun graduates. Minghao heads to the auditorium with the rest of ‘97 Line, but only upon Soonyoung’s insistence. And he’s only there on Soonyoung’s behalf, grinning and hugging the jubilant, teary-eyed choreographer when the ceremony finishes. He pretends that he isn’t disappointed that Jun never shows up, and yet, after he waves Soonyoung off with a promise to stay in touch, he finds himself walking into the storage room as if following an invisible string. He finds Jun already sitting on the piano stool, staring at the untouched keyboard. Somehow, Jun doesn’t look surprised. Minghao sits down somewhere, like he has done countless afternoons before, wondering if the five-year-old Jun is going to play something. Wondering why the eight-year-old Jun agreed to marry him if he knew he was just going to leave. Wondering what the thirteen-year-old Wen Junhui would think if he saw them now.)

 

* * *

 

21.

It’s Jun’s first grocery run all year, and he’s going to make the most of it.

Pulling on his face mask, he walks down the wall of refrigerated beverages until he finds the soy milk. He has always liked soy milk, even if he can’t quite remember why.

He’s reaching for the last carton so excitedly that he doesn’t notice that another person is already there.

That is, until they painfully bump heads.

Jun recoils, clutching his temple with a groan. The other man isn’t in much better shape. Remembering his manners, Jun drops the soy milk and leans down to help him with both hands.

“I’m so sorry, I completely blanked,” Jun babbles, pulling the poor man up from the floor. Absentmindedly, he dusts off the other man’s clothes, a minimalistic black tee paired with long, fashionable blue jeans. The other man is much quieter than he is, but given the circumstances, Jun attributes it more to shock than anything. “It’s been so long since I stepped out of the apartment and I forgot to pay attention and if there’s anything I can—”

It’s then that Jun realizes that the man is staring straight at him.

And that this is not their first time grabbing a soy milk together.

“Minghao?” he whispers, dumbstruck.

At the sound of his name, Minghao immediately scrambles back. He’s taller now, and his shoulders have finally filled out, and his hair has been grown and dyed and shaped into a coppery mullet, but Jun would recognize the person he grew up with anywhere.

“You’re talking to me?” Minghao asks stiffly, fixing his hair and looking anywhere but at Jun.

“No, I was talking to the refrigerator,” Jun says, and despite everything, this manages to elicit an incredulous snort out of him. As Jun straightens, swiping the carton of soy milk off the floor, something in his chest seems to crack. It’s almost like they’re kids again. “Yes, I was talking to you. I . . . we should have stayed in touch.”

“We should have?” he repeats unconvincingly, something in his expression shuttering.

It’s here, in the middle of a perfectly ordinary convenience store in South Korea, that Jun is struck with the knowledge that it has been a long time since Jun had any right to claim a “we” with Minghao.

Minghao, for his part, just closes his eyes and counts to some odd number before opening them again. He has always been the composed one between the two. Jun opens his mouth, but Minghao shuts him up with a shake of the head. “I’m over it,” Minghao says, and Jun does his best to pretend that the smile on Minghao’s face is a believable one. “You can keep the soy milk.”

“I’m not that thirsty anymore,” Jun says, but he doesn’t let go of the carton, and Minghao knows it.

Minghao’s eyes, always mysteriously clear, slide to Jun. “You know how my parents are mathematicians?”

“Yes,” Jun says, confused.

The defensive edge of Minghao’s smile wanes into something soft and distant and . . . sad.

As if Minghao has numbered all the times that defined his childhood and is playing the series out in his mind even as he pulls away.

“Numbers aren’t everything.”


End file.
